HOW THE MURDER CASE AGAINST AN ONTARIO MAN FELL APART. JABRIL ABDALLA ‘WAS THEIR FALL GUY.’
THE AUTHORITARIAN TEMPTATION IS ON THE RISE — FROM BELARUS TO THE UNITED STATES
Around the world, democracy is in retreat. The autocratic slide that began around the middle of the last decade reached a tipping point with the 2020 lockdowns. Authoritarianism is now in the ascendant both geopolitically (as power shifts from the West to China) and internally (as individuals demand the smack of firm government).
Glance at almost any bit of the map. The generals have taken back power in Burma. Belarus’ malign tyrant, Alexander Lukashenko, insouciant after his airline piracy, is upping the ante: recently, another of his opponents, Vitaly Shishov, was found murdered in Ukraine, his body strung up in a Kyiv park.
President Kais Saied of Tunisia has dissolved parliament, blocked Al Jazeera’s broadcasts and sent troops on to the streets. Tunisia was the last country where the Arab Spring might still be said to have been a success. A decade after those optimistic risings, it was the only state in the region scoring higher than it had before 2011 on measures such as corruption, internet freedom, security of property and the jailing of journalists. Cross Tunisia off the list and not a single Arab state qualifies as an open democracy.
Latin America, too, is collapsing into dictatorship. In Cuba last month, as in Venezuela in 2019, the soldiers remained loyal to their caudillo. The spasm of protest passed, leaving 500 demonstrators unaccounted for.
Indeed, the anti-democratic left is on a regional roll. Daniel Ortega, the sinister, lisping strongman who commanded Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and came back as president following a squalid deal in 2007, has no intention of allowing any more free ballots. He has rounded up and arrested 20 potential opposition candidates, ignoring the squeals of protest from the United States and Europe.
In my native Peru, the new Marxist president, Pedro Castillo, has filled his government with apologists for Shining Path terrorism. Peru’s embrace of the totalitarian left confirms the regional trend: Argentina and Bolivia recently went the same way and, more alarmingly, the continental grown-ups — Colombia, Brazil and Chile — look set to follow.
I could go on — I haven’t mentioned Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdogan — but you get the picture.
We should be careful not to pick a few eye-catching cases and infer a global trend from them. A piece of faulty wiring in our brains makes us over-interpret bad news. Reports of a gruesome murder, for example, make us think that crime is far higher than it really is. A single plane crash puts us irrationally off air travel. Psychologists call it “negativity bias,” and it constantly pushes us to needless pessimism.
Still, there are ways to quantify the global prevalence of liberal democracy. Are opposition candidates disqualified on technicalities? Are independent media able to operate? Are the electoral authorities free from government control?
Several organizations — Freedom House, International IDEA, the Economist Intelligence Unit and others — publish democratic league tables. Though they use slightly different methodologies, they all reach the same conclusion — namely that, after several decades of improvement, things have started to deteriorate. The Democracy Index, for example, found that just 8.4 per cent of the world’s population lived in full democracies in 2020, while more than a third lived under authoritarian rule. Its global score of 5.37 out of 10 was the lowest recorded since it started work in 2006.
To some extent, these numbers reflect ANTI-COVID measures. Emergency laws have been passed without proper scrutiny, borders closed, curfews imposed, anti-vax websites taken down. All these things might be seen as temporary. Except that the trend had already set in before the lockdowns.
In 2017, shortly before his death, the celebrated conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote “The Authoritarian Temptation,” which analyzed the way previously open democracies — Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela — had fallen to despotism:
“And now, in a development once unimaginable, mature Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethnonationalism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a weariness with parliamentary dysfunction and an attraction — still only an attraction, not yet a commitment — to strongman rule.”
When Krauthammer wrote those words, Trumpism was still a mutant strain that had, almost by accident, infected the Republican party. Even in 2017, being a conservative usually meant being a Reaganite — a believer in open competition, constitutional propriety and limited government. All that has gone now. Fox News, which fiercely opposed Trump during the primaries, now barely airs any alternative views. The same is true of its mimic, Newsmax. It is true, too, of previously free-market think tanks and of almost every congressional Republican. Donald Trump himself may have stormed sulkily off the stage, but not before he had shredded the tenets of the previous conservative creed: That character matters; that a bare majority doesn’t mean you can ignore the rules; that you should show restraint in government and generosity in opposition; that free trade makes everyone richer.
American conservatism has suddenly been transformed into something much closer to European authoritarianism of the kind embodied by, say, Marine Le Pen: Interventionist, hostile to globalization, impatient with parliamentary rule. The guiding text for the new movement is “Why Liberalism Failed” by the Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen. Some of its exponents argue that a benevolent dictatorship is preferable to a market-based democracy. One of their heroes is the Portuguese autocrat, Antonio Salazar.
In Britain, we have so far been spared the worst of this tendency. Still, the response to the Brexit referendum revealed that a large chunk of the nation was prepared, Trump-like, to disregard process in pursuit of a preferred outcome.
Luckily for us, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Rabelaisian personality, his horror at being bossed about, meant that Britain went into the lockdowns with, by global standards, an unusually liberal political culture.
But then came COVID, and all at once the country was full of petty dictators, demanding restrictions, raging at nonconformists, opposing any move to lift the prohibitions. The whole world was affected, but the change was especially noticeable in Britain, with its previously individualist culture.
The worst of it is how few people seem to care. Again, outcome trumps process. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has critics on the left, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro has critics on the right. But hardly anyone is disinterestedly making the case for constitutional democracy. The open society is slipping away unmourned and unremarked. By heaven, we’ll miss it when it has gone.
THE OPEN SOCIETY IS SLIPPING AWAY UNMOURNED AND UNREMARKED.